Highly decorative engraving by Buffon, a French naturalist, mathematician, biologist, cosmologist and author. Le Comte de Buffon was struck by the diversity of life and was not content with existing explanations of the natural world. 100 years before Darwin, Buffon, in his Histoire Naturelle, a 44 volume encyclopedia describing everything known about the natural world, was considering common ancestry of man and apes. Histoire naturelle : générale et particulière (Oiseaux).